Christina Tosi

My first baking memory, because I am like a really selfish sweet tooth, is an eating memory as much as it is a baking memory.

And it is my mom's mom, my grandma, country grandma, like cornfields, livestock, cattle farm in Ohio.

Her cookie that she would always make was an oatmeal cookie.

It's a slightly wetter dough.

There's two eggs in it for two sticks of butter.

So it's a slightly wetter dough, a little less flour and a lot of whole rolled oats because her like self-talk was like, they're cookies.

Everyone needs cookies in life, but like they're hearty, right?

Like these farmers can really, they really got to like line their stomachs with these hearty oats.

And she would make giant batches of them during harvest season.

And the dough itself is, like, knockout delicious.

But the other fun—she'd make them in big batches, refrigerate the dough because it was more wet and sticky to deal with, scoop it after it was done refrigerating, and then rolled it in confectioner's sugar and baked them.

And I both loved, of course, watching something being made out of nothing, but—

My memory of it, the love of watching it bake probably came second because the second I got to lick the batter, lick the beater as it were as a kid, I was like, this is what I want for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

But also, I was a little naughty, so when she wasn't looking...

I'd go into her like country refrigerator and just steal bites of cookie dough.

And one day, Shilpa, she was like, we made enough cookies to make, you know, 60 cookies and there's only 50 cookies here.

What's up?

And I'm also a terrible liar.

And she saw right through me.

So it was like the food memory that threw me into baking.